Agreed in particular, disagree in general: several of the plausible suggestions here could have significant downside risks. In particular, I'm not going to switch to Soylent or create a tulpa until I've seen good evidence that it doesn't wreck any significant fraction of people's lives.

Basically, you're saying it might be possible to reduce your identity to a single stable meme-complex. Certainly, there have been people (mainly religious) who've tried this...

To generalize: except for very specific circumstances (like talking to advanced rationalists who've declared Crocker's Rules), if you don't consider the probable effects of saying something unusual before you say it, then you fail at consequentialism. Words are actions!

This isn't license for dishonesty—there are many parameters you can vary and still keep the same content. (To name one that people easily forget, you can convince someone much more readily if you talk to them privately instead of before an audience!)

I said that one should apply a filter of cynicism first.

Obama's actions on several fronts have certainly dismayed his supporters, but that's a far cry from them being indistinguishable from the policies that McCain or Romney would have enacted. (In particular, if you really think that stimulus and health care expansion were likely to have happened in the same way under McCain, I have to question your grip on reality.) In order to make voting worthwhile, you don't have to take politicians' statements at face value, you just have to be able to estimate some significant differences in their likely actions.

Without discussing the merits of your proposal, this is something that clearly falls under "mathematical/epistemic/decision-theoretic reason to reject Pascal's Wager and Mugger", so I don't understand why you left that comment here.

Yes, but which version do you want the higher-quality discussion on, and which one do you want more casual readers to see?

I missed that. It's bad enough notation that I expect others to stumble over it, too.

2) Some of the arguments against Pascal's Wager and Pascal's Mugging don't depend on the probability. For instance, Pascal's Wager has the "worshipping the wrong god" problem--what if there's a god who prefers that he not be worshipped and damns worshippers to Hell? Even if there's a 99% chance of a god existing, this is still a legitimate objection (unless you want to say there's a 99% chance specifically of one type of god).

That argument is isomorphic to the one discussed in the post here:

"Hmm..." she says. "I hadn't thought of that. But what if these equations are right, and yet somehow, everything I do is exactly balanced, down to the googolth decimal point or so, with respect to how it impacts the chance of modern-day Earth participating in a chain of events that leads to creating an intergalactic civilization?"

"How would that work?" you say. "There's only seven billion people on today's Earth - there's probably been only a hundred billion people who ever existed total, or will exist before we go through the intelligence explosion or whatever - so even before analyzing your exact position, it seems like your leverage on future affairs couldn't reasonably be less than a one in ten trillion part of the future or so."

Essentially, it's hard to argue that the probabilities you assign should be balanced so exactly, and thus (if you're an altruist) Pascal's Wager exhorts you either to devote your entire existence to proselytizing for some god, or proselytizing for atheism, depending on which type of deity seems to you to have the slightest edge in probability (maybe with some weighting for the awesomeness of their heavens and awfulness of their hells).

So that's why you still need a mathematical/epistemic/decision-theoretic reason to reject Pascal's Wager and Mugger.

Typo:

opportunities to affect small large numbers of sentient beings

Pretty sure "polyamory is boring" was meant as a reference to this post, not in a pejorative sense. (Of course, the phrase is misleading about the content if you haven't read that post!)